Touchscreen devices have recently become widely used by consumers, business employees, and other users. Touchscreen devices are able to detect user input through touch. In general, a user touches a touchscreen of the touchscreen device with his/her finger or with a stylus in order to interact with the touchscreen device. This way, touchscreen devices allow a user to interact directly with the content on the touchscreen (e.g., windows, graphics, text, etc.) without using other input devices such as a keyboard or a mouse. Examples of touchscreen devices include tablet computers, mobile phones, video game devices, global positioning system (GPS) navigation devices, personal data assistants (PDAs), watches, interactive displays, and other electronic devices with a touchscreen.
With the advent of the Internet and large storage servers (e.g., standalone server racks or multiple computers connected via the Internet to form a “cloud”), very large data repositories storing over a petabyte (i.e., 1000 terabytes) of data have become commonplace (e.g., web databases, financial databases, video/audio databases, etc.). Searching and indexing such large data repositories is intrinsically more complex than searching and indexing smaller data repositories. Consequently, various methods and services (e.g., database computer languages, Internet search engines) were developed to help users obtain relevant results when searching a large data repository. Usually, a user enters a search query and other search criteria (e.g., search terms, search location, keywords, logical functions, and other possible criteria) to determine the content to be searched and the broadness (e.g., scope, specificity, etc.) of the search (i.e., how specific the search results should be to the search query). On the one hand, if the search is too broad, the search results may be mostly irrelevant. The user would then have difficulty finding relevant results among the mostly irrelevant search results. On the other hand, if a search is too narrow, the search results might be incomplete (i.e., the search results might not contain all possible relevant results stored on the data repository being searched). A user may be either unfamiliar with search query features such as Boolean operators, wildcards, special keywords, and other advanced features used in search queries or he/she may find it too cumbersome to use these features to control the broadness of a search. Therefore, a simple and intuitive method for obtaining broader or narrower search results to a search query is needed.